There is a need for a thin camera or imaging system for many applications. An approach to realizing a thin camera with sufficient resolution involves scaling an imaging system of a conventional camera 10, shown in FIG. 1, down by some factor. In the following example, the conventional camera is an f/1 camera having a lens 12 with a focal length f, here a 4 mm focal length, and a detector array 14, here having 200×200 pixels with 20 microns per pixel. The resolution of this camera is given by 1/(20 microns) or 50 lines per mm. The desired scaling factor in this example is ten. The resulting scaled down thin camera 20, shown in FIG. 2, includes a micro-lens 22, here having a 400-micron focal length and a micro-detector array 24, here being a 200×200 array of 2 microns per pixel. Here the pixels are assumed to have the same dimension in both the x- and y-direction.
More generally, assume the focal plane has nx pixels or sensors of a size px in the x-direction and ny pixels of size py in the y-direction. The resolution is then defined as 1/px in the x-direction and 1/py in the y-direction. If px and py could be reduced by a desired scaling factor, thus keeping nx and ny the same, as noted above, then f could be reduced by an order of magnitude, while maintaining the resolution. However, this scaled down pixel size may be limited by availability and/or price of current sensors. Further, there is not enough power in such a scaled down system. In the above example shown in FIG. 2, the scaled version only has about 1/100th of the power of the original camera.